I think it’s also laced with misogyny—who does she think she is, entitled millennial brat, asking for free shit! Her request is very common in marketing. It’s called a fucking Barter deal. I negotiate barter agreements all the time. It’s pretty standard in entertainment. All they had to say was no, but to mock her…

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I just the other day watched a video made by the Bucket List Family, who are the only “influencers” I follow, about how they got started. Although they’re huge on Instagram and YouTobe now, and have sponsored partnerships with the likes of Disney & GoPro, they said that in the…

Fair point, perhaps, but you can be a hotel owner and say no to a wannabe influencer without being a complete raging dick about it. You’d think this woman disputed the management’s masculinity or something considering the way they reacted.

Is that not true about every single occupation out there? Most people are unsophisticated and not good at their jobs. It’s rare to excel at anything at all.

it’s a $66/night hotel room so totally reasonable for her followers to stay at. She just should of researched their reputation beforehand, and I’m sure she’s just getting bad advice or following someone like Casey Neistat or PewdiePie’s girlfriend’s advice cause a lot of those channels do go to hotels or on planes and…

100k followers on instagram is not a “few” followers. Even if a lot of them are bots. It’s literally cost this person nothing for her to stay there and if she converts 10 people for her 1 stay it’s worth it to him. She just asked the guy who markets himself by saying he’ll, “shoot vegans dead” if they come on his…

except that was my entire argument was showing, as Defranco did, that she did have demonstrable ROI.

You could be right. I don’t know. But I do know that based on seeing brands take huge advantage of bloggers, I don’t really care if some bloggers find a way to turn the tables.

“You stay at places on your own dime and write reviews.”

She has a SHIT TON of followers. Not “a few.”

That’s not what she asked for. She asked for something in exchange for something else.

No, you do it the way you do it because you get PAID to go to lunches and schmooze. Bloggers don’t get paid unless stuff is getting sent to us. We can’t blunder about the world spending months getting to know people before asking for what we want. There’s no paycheck in that. How this girl did it is how it’s done.

You could be right. My biggest objection to their behavior is that they obviously get these requests on the regular, but they decided to pick what they perceived as a soft target to go after. They didn’t pick someone who they thought could mount a good defense, kick their asses, or otherwise make them look bad. To me…

I work with bloggers and influencers with my job regularly and completely agree. We’ve gotten a lot of silly/entitled requests from bloggers, and sure we’ll make fun of the person behind their back probably but it’s really easy to just politely or sternly say no thanks. These hotel owners just kinda seem like they…

I do it part time, have been for the last twelve years. I primarily do outdoor industry stuff. It is definitely handled differently from sales and marketing, and all of my efforts to change that have been in vain. So I have just accepted that it’s free stuff for a review on our site, for which we then sell…

Could be, but that’s their problem. There are many that do make a good living out of it. The fact is that brands DO benefit from the blogger economy and they DO take advantage of it. The guys in this debacle are doing the same - leveraging reviews to get attention for their business.

Unfortunately, I think we had a public referendum on this about 16 months ago and the statement “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” won, albeit on a technicality.

That could very well be true, and it’s also because they don’t provide insider information about their companies to outsiders.

87,000 isn’t exactly a “Few” and there’s nothing wrong with being a startup. It’s no different from some reviewer from a local rag selling 10k copies trying to review a restaurant. They’re people trying to build their brand and working a deal. Her email is entirely professional and she presents a valid, if…

Social media “influencer” here. That’s because they will never, ever provide influencers with that data. They just won’t. It’s part of the problem with this whole social media economy. You can’t prove your worth aside from hits and clicks and you just have to guess how those translate to dollars.